Kudos to Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) for throwing herself in front of reporters and preening around on the Senate floor to pose as an economic populist and push for a cap on executive salaries at banks that take taxpayers' bailout money. That's great - but let's remember what a sleight-of-hand this really is.
McCaskill, you may recall, twice voted for the no-strings-attached bailout that she now purports to be upset about. Now that bailout opponents predictions have come true and bailout cash has been used to subsidize executive salaries, the public is ripshit, and McCaskill is waltzing around for the cameras pretending to be angry, too (although, tellingly, not apologizing for voting for the bailouts that people told her would create the problem she says she's angry about). Of course, now that all the bailout money is allocated, her complaints don't come with any legislative leverage whatsoever. They are theater for the ignorant.
Had McCaskill seriously cared about the executive pay issue - and had the Beltway media done its job and reported this story correctly - they would have paid attention to Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-VT) legislation introduced long ago that would have capped executive salaries at bailed out banks. After all, Sanders sent a letter to McCaskill asking for her co-sponsorship way back in October (a letter that McCaskill ignored as evidenced by the fact that she refused to co-sponsor the legislation).
Instead, Sanders was brushed aside, and then when his ideas proved to be politically popular and substantively smart, people like McCaskill simply took them up after the fact, knowing that the D.C. media is more than happy to ignore progressives like Sanders and fawn all over conservative Democrats, even if those conservative Democrats are pushing ideas long after the legislative game has ended.
This is what we can call the Marginalization Machine that operates every day in Washington, D.C. - and it pervades not only the Congress and the media, but in many cases, the progressive movement itself. We tend to take seriously only proposals by conservatives - whether Republican or Democrats - because we assume movement progressives aren't, well, Serious. That, of course, creates a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby ignored progressives have little outside support to help them make good policy politically possible, and we end up having to rely on the least reliable legislators to move our agenda (or, in this particular case, pretend to move our agenda).
So again, while I'm glad Claire McCaskill feels so humiliated about twice voting for the bailouts that she's pushing executive pay caps, I wish she would have made her voice heard when it really mattered. I wish she would have supported the legislation that was already crafted, rather than waiting until after all the votes were cast and then trying to steal credit for a bill proposed long ago by her own colleagues. Had she done that, she may have ruffled a few Senate feathers, but she may also have shown she was actually serious about legislating, not just about getting headlines for herself.
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